RE my pulled CIRSA post: Whether Old Media or New, sometimes it’s still like making sausage

Seriously, this post is meant to explain why a link on Lookout Colorado[1] yesterday evening went dead shortly after it went live. Further, I think the situation gives us a good chance to discuss blog theory[2], if you will.

Is it really possible to pull a blog? Or as my friend Mark Eddy put it to me this morning over coffee and vitamin water, isn’t shutting down a blog post the Old Media[3] equivalent of running around town yanking newspapers from racks and doorsteps?

A futile effort.

And how should a news organization like The Denver Post handle blogging about scoops it plans to run in the print edition?

First, the explanation for what happened with the dead link (which I plan to update later today).

I thought I had it worked it out with my editors that a story I had written about significant pay raises at the Colorado Intergovernmental Risk Sharing Agency was to be published in The Denver Post today. I was given the go-ahead to promote it with summary information on this blog and through social media.

And so I blogged and tweeted and linked on Facebook and what have you and left the office a little early eager to meet my wife and head out to gear up for last night’s Ozzy and Slash bash at the Pepsi Center. (No. Your correspondent isn’t a metal head, but he likes these two in small doses. (And the show rocked.))

Checking my e-mail at Pints Pub, I discovered a short string of messages from editors containing the information that my story was going to wait a day for publication, and my blog post had been pulled.

Holding stories is a common practice in newsrooms. Sometimes they are held because a clear-eyed editor finds a flaw or a weakness that requires more reporting. Sometimes stories are held because they contain information that can wait.

For example, my CIRSA[4] story came solely from work I did in reviewing public records. The information wasn’t out in the community in the form of a press release, an announcement or as a piece provided by another news organization.

Though many people who blissfully live and toil outside of newsrooms have the notion that papers provide “all the news that’s fit to print,” the reality is that newspapers are confined by the amount of pages that are allotted for the next day’s publication.

This is a business decision that involves calculations and considerations above my pay grade. But I can tell you that the result is that some days, editors are given the amount of space they need. Other days, they are hungry for stories to fill pages. And, like yesterday, some days conspire to provide an embarrassment of riches.

The newspaper process has been compared many times over the years to sausage making – more churn than art.

And so there it is.

Had I not been sipping a pint of stout and eyeing the clock for the concert’s start time (I didn’t want to miss any of Slash’s pyrotechnics) I would have had the presence of mind to get myself to a computer and simply update the blog post to say that it was to be published in the paper on Thursday.

My editor concedes this morning that that also should have been how the editors responded last night.

But a great deal was going on in the political world yesterday, with the scuffle between Hickenlooper and Vidal and Ryan Call’s entrance into the race for the Republican Party chair.

And so the crutch of old habits held sway.

And so your correspondent raises this question: How to handle these situations in the future? Because until the horrifying day comes that a physical newspaper is no longer hurled onto doorsteps in the morning, this dynamic I’m describing will exist.

My takeaway from this experience goes like this.

The next time I have a scoop, I’m going to see if I can’t convince my editors to skip the summary promo and instead allow me to put everything I know on this blog in the first part of the newsgathering day, or at least by early to mid afternoon. I would argue that by doing so, I stand a good chance of getting smart folks out there in the reading public to respond either with reaction or insight that I can then use to further develop the story for the next day’s paper.

Otherwise, I risk yet another situation of scooping myself – and the possibility of ruining a perfectly good evening.